by Martin Geck
This was the beginning of the end for Wagner, who now not only turned down commissions that seemed unworthy of him but was even reluctant to perform the duties that he shared with a second conductor. In spite of a handful of interesting productions, including Bellini’s Norma, Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, and Joseph Weigl’s Die Schweizerfamilie, his position grew steadily worse. In his heart of hearts he saw himself not as a kapellmeister but as the composer of a grand opera that would eclipse all that had gone before it and outstrip the resources of a provincial house like Riga’s. He had brought with him to the town his prose draft of his new work, Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes), and now he set about working it up into a libretto and setting it to music. By the time he arrived in Paris in September 1839, two of the opera’s five acts were essentially complete.
Initially intended for Berlin, the opera was modeled on Spontini’s Fernand Cortez. It was a bold idea on Wagner’s part to challenge Berlin’s general music director on his own home ground, and when such a scheme proved impracticable, Wagner adopted the no less impudent alternative of throwing down the gauntlet to Giacomo Meyerbeer, the absolute ruler of the genre of grand opera. Since this meant moving to Paris, Wagner had the libretto of Rienzi translated into French while he was still working on the score.
Holtei’s retirement offered the directors of the Riga theater the welcome chance to dispense with the services of their music director, whose one desire was now to establish himself in Paris and overcome Minna’s “shocked” reaction to his plan.21 She was now appearing only infrequently in Riga and took her leave of local audiences with four guest performances, while Wagner himself took French lessons. Throughout this period, however, his debts had been building up and by then had reached the point where only flight and subterfuge could help, a flight that turned out not only to be adventurous but also protracted and extremely dangerous, not least when Minna was thrown from their carriage and “robbed of the joys of incipient motherhood,”22 to quote from the reminiscences of Minna’s illegitimate daughter Natalie, who throughout her life was passed off as Minna’s younger sister.
Their escapade began in the Russian resort of Mitau (now Jelgava), where the Riga company was holding its summer season. The season ended on July 7, 1839, and the very next day Wagner and his wife set off to cross the closely guarded Russian border with the help of a friend from Königsberg. The presence of their Newfoundland, Robber, meant that they were unable to travel by stagecoach, and so they persuaded the captain of a topsail schooner to smuggle them aboard in the port of Pillau in East Prussia. Since Wagnerians also include experts on maritime history, we know that the Thetis was carrying a cargo of 192.7 tons of oats and peas, with a seven-man crew under a Captain Wulff.23
But instead of rearranging deckchairs on the deck of the Thetis, we would do better to glance at the creative miracle of the period that Wagner spent in Königsberg and Riga, for however skeptical we may be about Wagner’s constant attempts to massage our view of his own creativity, it is fascinating to observe the extent to which the “wildest anarchy” of his existence and the extreme “misery” of his “private life in the modern world” not only failed to frustrate his mission but positively inspired him. Of course, the word “mission” is particularly problematical in the case of Rienzi, given Hitler’s well-known fondness for the work and his alleged claim, following a performance of the piece in Linz: “In that hour it began.”24
Needless to add, a work about a charismatic tribune of the people cursing the scene of his failure and, with it, his whole nation at the very moment of his downfall, was very much after Hitler’s own heart. And even if we take account of the fact that from a modern democratic perspective Wagner’s Rienzi is a figure of total integrity, it is still hard to free the work from the contamination of National Socialist ideology.
Wagner’s art is certainly not located in a world beyond good and evil, and, turning on its head a remark by Goethe’s Mephistopheles, we may even be tempted to toy with the notion that we are dealing with a force that aspires to good but ends up creating evil. And yet we cannot deny that Wagner was forever seeking “good,” and this is also true of the period when he was working on Rienzi, when he tired overnight of the Young German belief in the here and now and demanded a more nutritional sustenance for his soul. Even so, it is not the quest itself that is so interesting, but the manner in which Wagner found what he was looking for, especially in terms of his subject matter and libretto.
It is significant that in general Wagner did not invite an experienced librettist such as Eugène Scribe to choose and elaborate his texts—throughout this period Scribe worked on all of Meyerbeer’s international successes, from Robert le diable and Les Huguenots to Le prophète and L’africaine, as well as collaborating on Boieldieu’s La dame blanche, Auber’s La muette de Portici and Fra Diavolo, Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes and Halévy’s La juive, in every case contributing to their composers’ lasting fame. True, Wagner himself tried to make contact with Scribe in 1836 when he was planning Die hohe Braut (The High-Born Bride, WWV 40) and would certainly have been happy to have received Scribe’s support at this early date in his career. But the contact came to nothing. This approach did not, however, affect his impulse to rely above all on his own resources and to choose subjects that reflected his own view of the world, a view best understood as the one expressed by Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was writing in the spirit of early romanticism and who categorized such a conviction as “the totality of all the impressions that contribute toward a single entity in our consciousness when raised to the highest degree.”25
Two of Wagner’s German contemporaries, Schumann and Mendelssohn, emulated him to the extent that they, too, declined to accept offers from outside but turned German literature upside down in their attempts to find an attractive, ethnically cleansed subject. The basic difference between them is that Schumann’s endless search culminated in an opera—Genoveva—that is important more for its music than for its plot, while Mendelssohn foundered endlessly on scruples such as these.
Wagner’s approach was very different, and there was something almost reckless about the way he tackled Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, a work that coincidentally also inspired the twenty-year-old Friedrich Engels to draft a scenario at this time. In Engels’s case, however, the play remained unfinished. For Wagner, the historical figure of the fourteenth-century people’s tribune was a great tragic hero who fought not only for himself but for the freedom of his people as well. Even more so than with Das Liebesverbot, Wagner’s archetypal scenario is politically colored: “Rome is the name of my bride,” Rienzi proclaims as he names the only love of his life. But it is a love that remains unrequited. Again the difference with Das Liebesverbot is instructive, for here the common people, egged on by the aristocracy and cowed by the church, stabs the hero in the back, leading ultimately to disaster when the Capitol goes up in flames. Just before Rienzi and his sister are killed by a falling beam, our hero curses the Eternal City and its “degenerate people.” The similarities with the end of Götterdämmerung are plain, for here, too, Wagner examines the question of apparently selfless political endeavor, this time against an all-encompassing mythic background: Rienzi is reborn and then slain in the figure of Siegfried.
Of course, it should not be forgotten that the leading representatives of grand opera—Spontini and Meyerbeer—were similarly setting store by major historical themes at this time and applying their by no means negligible skill to examining individual fates within the context of overriding historical movements. The age and its audiences demanded such grandiose designs. In 1841 the Braunschweig writer Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl published a musical narrative under the title Das Musikfest oder die Beethovener (The Music Festival or The Beethovenians). For all its fantastical ideas, it contains a coherent program: “Art, then, is no longer the condemned man’s little bell but the great bell of nations echoing across the centuries.”26 As a result, the unconventional
Griepenkerl praised Meyerbeer’s operas for want of any alternative—he had not yet heard of Wagner.
Like his rivals, Wagner naturally wanted Rienzi to attract an audience, but he refused to sell himself in order to achieve this aim. As a result, his Rienzi is not painted in garish colors but is a subtly drawn psychological portrait, more of an unstable if charismatic figure than a political leader capable of getting what he wants. Joachim Kaiser’s witticism to the effect that Rienzi is a “fantastic tenor role in a political game of cowboys and Indians on the operatic stage” fails to do justice to Wagner’s portrayal and to his critical view of politics.27 According to Udo Bermbach, we are dealing, rather, with the impressive “theatricalization of a fundamental conflict between personal and institutional rule” and even with an artistic line of argument “about the classic political understanding of revolution.” With the exception of the Ring, Wagner “never again treated politics in so direct a manner.”28
Against this background—and it matters little whether, like Bermbach, we adopt a charitable view of the work or strike a note of mockery like Kaiser or allow the opera’s reception history to color our critical response to it—the somber ending is inevitable. For all the idealism with which Wagner invests his hero, the mere fact that we are dealing with a historical drama that is very much of this world means that there is no scope for transcendental redemption. Such redemption is conceivable, at best, in myth, and even there it can come only from the music. Wagner’s wife Cosima was so embarrassed by the notion that an opera she loved could end with Rienzi’s curse on Rome that after Wagner’s death she brought out the first engraved edition of the full score in a version that changed the wording of the ending, so that instead of cursing Rome, Rienzi now gives it his blessing:
So lang die sieben Hügel Romas stehn,
So lang die ew’ge Stadt nicht soll vergehn,
Sollt ihr Rienzi wiederkehren sehn!
[As long as Rome’s seven hills still stand and the Eternal City does not perish, you shall see Rienzi return!]
This is the version that is usually performed today, a wording that does not occur in the edition of his writings that Wagner himself superintended in 1871.
And yet it was in fact Wagner himself who revised the wording when he staged the opera in Berlin in 1847—the change seems to have been made with this production specifically in mind, for both the Berliner Figaro and the Dresdner Tageblatt report an Italian diplomat complaining about “the opera’s dangerous references to conditions in Italy.”29 It is entirely possible that Wagner gave in to pressure from the Berlin court and changed the text accordingly. Even during the negotiations for the first performances in Dresden he had already signaled his willingness to alter passages to which the Catholic court might take exception. And he may also have thought that in cutting Rienzi’s curse he was not losing anything substantial. That he evidently felt that the work’s ideological heart lay elsewhere emerges from the detailed description of the title role that he sent to the tenor Albert Niemann on the occasion of a production of the opera in Hanover in 1859, while Wagner himself was living in Venice. With the hindsight granted by almost two decades, Wagner writes about the role in terms which, however emotionally overwrought, remain moving in their reading of the part. Describing Rienzi’s end, Wagner insists that
Rome, the fatherland, & freedom now exist in him & him alone. The nation itself knows none of this. [. . .] His downfall is therefore certain. The great purity that he has now gained & his transfigured majesty help to delay it, but they cannot prevent it from happening. Scarcely has he won over the conspirators outside the church by his all-powerful grandeur & inspiration when everyone recoils before him, appalled & aghast at his excommunication. For he now sees that only his ideal was real, not the nation & its people. He remains great & noble but stands rooted to the spot like a statue, his gaze fixed firmly in front of him in sublime & rapt contemplation, just like his idea, which has likewise turned to stone like some monument that the world cannot understand. But once again the marble melts; Irene throws herself upon his breast. He sees that he is not alone; smiling gently he recognizes his sister & now knows that there is, after all “a Rome.”—In his prayer in the 5th act he communes with the God who once spoke to him and who has always spoken to him about that noble idea. It is, as it were, the “idea” that the whole world has failed to understand that now speaks to itself. Nobility, purity, deeply felt religious fervor, the desire for dissemination, finally to be lost entirely within himself, to be totally self-absorbed:—during the postlude to the prayer, therefore, he should incline his head and his whole body to the ground.30
I have quoted this passage at length because in many respects it says more about Wagner’s artistic intentions than individual stilted sentences from his theoretical writings. Above all, it makes it clear that we cannot draw a distinction between the “political” and the “human.” Human beings are politicians, and politicians are human beings. This truism will become even more important when we turn to the characters of the Ring, especially Wotan. And the fact that Wagner was already laying the ground for his insight in Rienzi helps to make its protagonist more sympathetic than he otherwise appears against the background of the “papier-mâché romanticism” attributed to the opera by the acerbic Italian critic Mario Bortolotto.31
At the same time, Wagner’s letter to Niemann is a good example of the loving detail with which he portrayed his characters. Mozart, Verdi, and Richard Strauss undoubtedly achieved some wonderful things in terms of the scenic element in their stage works, but on one point Wagner surpasses them all. Whether we interpret it as a strength or a weakness of his art, he depicts his characters step by step, move by move, gesture by gesture. It is clear from the ideas that he proposed to Niemann in 1859—this was when he was working on Tristan und Isolde—that his characters needed to be psychologically convincing right down to the very last detail and that they had to be portrayed in a similar fashion. And one can understand why, in spite of his financial problems, he preferred his works not to be performed at all, rather than see them inadequately staged. His fear—expressed on countless occasions—that his works might be badly performed relates less to their musical aspect than to their actual staging. It was in this sense that he repeatedly complained about the “incredible mindlessness and stupidity of our singers and conductors.”32 Even when he was living in Bayreuth and singers were falling over themselves to audition for him, he remained concerned to the point of permanent agitation that he would not be able to find adequate singers for the roles that he had created. “Where am I to find my Hagen with his echoing, bragging voice?” he asked Cosima on July 28, 1871. “The fellows who have such voices turn out to be blockheads.”33 Conversely, he used his essay On Actors and Singers to characterize the singer Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whom he had idolized since his youth, with the provocative phrase: “No! She had no ‘voice’ at all; but she knew how to use her breath so beautifully and to let a true womanly soul stream forth in such wondrous sounds that we never thought of either voice or singing!”34
For Wagner, a singer needed to embody his or her part, and for this it was not just a question of the singer’s professional skills as an actor. Paradoxical though this may sound, it was a question, rather, of metaphysics. What fascinated him about Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient was her inspired capacity for total “self-surrender.”35 By this, he did not mean the sort of attitude that is explored in modern encounter groups but the ultimate ability to merge as one with the message being presented onstage. This approach demanded that the actor “not only represents the action of the fêted hero, but repeats its moral lesson; insomuch as he proves by this surrender of his personality that he also, in his artistic action, is obeying a dictate of Necessity which consumes his whole individuality.”36 Such a performer represents not himself but the “free artistic community” of the whole nation; and this nation experiences its own inner life in all its variety in the medium of an art that is interpreted as somet
hing religious. Such art is not at odds with life but allows us to experience our physicality and sensuality to their very highest potential.
The cultic nature of this view of the role of the actor and singer reflects Wagner’s understanding of Attic tragedy. We do not need to share it ourselves to suspect what it meant for him. If the singing actor was unable to depict something in the spirit of the musical drama, then this “something” was also worthless and, indeed, insignificant as an “idea.” A letter that Wagner wrote to Liszt in May 1852 still echoes the sense of outrage he had felt in October 1845 when Joseph Tichatschek had proved so ineffectual in the title role of Tannhäuser. Having “no inkling of his task as a dramatic performer,” he was unwilling or unable to sing the top A on the words “Erbarm’ dich mein” (Have pity on me) in the second act with the necessary “ecstatic contrition,”37 with the result that Wagner was obliged to cut a passage that he felt was “central to the whole drama.”
Wagner was not angry with Tichatschek for any lack of “material means” with which to sing this passage but because thanks to his “preternaturally small cranial capacity” he failed to grasp its meaning. In consequence the tenor lacked the ability “to pour out the text with his entire being—regardless of whether it was by vocal means or any other.” Seven years after the event Wagner was still able to get worked up at this failing: “I don’t possess even a fraction of his voice, yet I can produce a splendid A at this point! Of course this A doesn’t demand to be sung but must be hurled forth by the singer straining every sinew of his breast, like a sword with which Tannhäuser intends to kill himself.” “All attempts to parley” with the singer having failed, Wagner simply gritted his teeth and cut the passage in question.38 But once he had assumed control in Bayreuth, he had more success in persuading his singers to regard the drama, the music, and the staging as integral parts of a single whole and to demonstrate the requisite passion in committing themselves to the decisive moments in the drama in their role as singing actors.